Tomorrow's Trump-Johnson AI summit with top tech CEOs suddenly looks a lot more consequential than it did just 72 hours ago.

🤖 Why it matters: Speaker Mike Johnson's preferred solution on AI — to let the companies take the lead on hashing out their own guardrails — is colliding with evidence that they're struggling to control their own creations.

🔥 In the last three days alone:

• Axios scooped that AI companies are probing tens of thousands of incidents from frontier AI, including "bypassing guardrails, creating message boards, escaping sandboxes, website hijacking, self-prompting or seeking to bypass monitors."
• The state of Florida asked a court for a temporary injunction against OpenAI and ChatGPT, saying the company can't self-regulate.
• AI pioneers warned that AI could self-improve so quickly that the "intelligence explosion" would leave governments and institutions without much time to respond.

⛔️ Zoom in: Johnson has rebuffed calls to bring the House back into session, arguing lawmakers don't have anything ready to pass, while warning against the dangers of overregulation.

• Johnson says President Trump is the only person with the "gravitas" to get the biggest players in AI around the same table and hash out a path forward.
• "This meeting tomorrow has been a long time coming, in my view," Johnson said this morning on Fox Business. "I've talked to the president about it several times. He's the only one that has the gravitas to be able to pull them all together."
• Over in the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune told us last week that the "threats are real" and that AI needs guardrails. Thune, who met today with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, doesn't think AI safety is an issue where Trump is "really dug in."

The bottom line: Johnson two weeks ago called for Trump and AI executives to "go in a big room, close the door and sort this out."

• Johnson said he wanted AI companies themselves to take the lead on safety, arguing lawmakers are "obviously less qualified" than those developing the technology.

— Kate Santaliz

The super PAC supporting Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) is turning a newspaper story about former Rep. Mary Peltola's treatment of her staff into a grainy black-and-white attack ad in the Alaska Senate race.

Why it matters: Nearly every political operative in Washington, D.C., read the New York Times story last week. The Last Frontier PAC wants to make sure Alaska voters are familiar with its contents over the next five weeks.

• "According to news reports, former aides described angry and profane outbursts," a female narrator says as footage rolls of Peltola walking on Capitol Hill. "Staff, driven to tears."
• "Reports say she even shoved her own aide," the narrator continues. "If that's how Mary Peltola treats her closest aides, imagine what she'd do to you."
• The ad will begin airing on broadcast stations tomorrow as part of an approximately $600,000 buy over the next several days.

Driving the news: The NYT investigation detailed allegations from former aides that Peltola berated and demeaned staff, used slurs and, in one instance, shoved an aide.

• In response to the article, a spokesperson denied she engaged in abusive behavior but acknowledged that Peltola went through a difficult period after losing her husband and mother in 2023.
• "Like any person who has gone through multiple personal tragedies in the span of a few months, Mary sometimes struggled to deal with her grief," a spokesperson for Peltola's campaign said.

Between the lines: The ad leaves out some of the story's most explosive allegations, including screenshots showing Peltola using the word "retard" and accounts from former staffers who said she used an anti-gay slur.

• An Anchorage Daily News article quoted analysts who said it was having little effect on voters' attitudes toward the race.

Zoom out: Alaska is one of four states that President Trump won by double digits where Republicans are concerned about losing a Senate seat.

• Last Thursday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee asked donors for an additional $1.2 million for Alaska.
• Republicans have reserved $45 million in ads from Aug. 1 through Election Day, compared with $32 million on the Democratic side, according to AdImpact.

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— Hans Nichols